In the field of electronic commerce, also known as e-commerce, there are interactive websites that assist users in creating photo-based projects such as photo-books, photo-calendars, photo-cards, and photo-invitations. Such interactive websites allow users to upload photos and interact with the websites to create photo-based projects that are customized to user's preferences. Conventional photo-based project web sites, however, come with various drawbacks.
A common drawback with conventional photo-based project websites is the amount of time required by a user to create a photo-based project. A user often must participate in a variety of functions and processes in order to complete a photo-based project. For example, users usually must sort through the photos they desire to upload, remove the photos that are not adequate or properly focused, choose the photos to be uploaded, group photos together by topic or location, order the photos by chronological order, and crop or focus photos on the relevant portions of said photos. Performing the processes above can take an inordinate amount of time and can be tedious for users. Further, there are corrections and modifications that users often make to photos before they can be used in a photo-based project. For example, users often must correctly orient photos (landscape view as opposed to portrait view, for example), re-color photos or perform a color correction on the photos, remove red-eye from the eyes of photo subjects, and correct the photos for brightness or contrast. All of the corrections and modifications mentioned above require that the user open a special program or app, choose the photo to be corrected or modified, perform the correction or modification, and then save the newly modified photo. Again, performing the corrections and modifications mentioned above can be time-consuming and displeasure for users. As such, many users that log on to conventional photo-based project web sites often drop off or discontinue the process after a certain amount of time, without completing a purchase transaction.
Additionally, prior art products for a photobook creation are often based on a theme or stylistic parameter. However, they often do not have any bearing on the layouts used and on how photos are grouped together. Prior art products also lack a photo feature extraction, an object detection, and an analysis of photos to customize the photobook automatically for the user.
Prior art products also lack a layering of photos based on a photo feature extraction, an object detection, and an analysis. With such shortcomings in the prior art, an Internet user or customer may need to spend undue time and labor in customizing layouts, colors, themes, and captions of photos and texts to be able to finally design and print-by-order a satisfactory photobook. Undue time and labor in such a customization is a barrier to decide on an online purchase of a photobook. Such a barrier is also known as a “friction point.” Such barriers or friction points are further compounded by unfriendly graphical user interfaces of prior art products and photo editing software, and result in additional inefficiencies and errors in printing a media-based product, such as a photobook. Such friction points result in loss of potential customers before the customers reach the point where they can order the media-based product for printing; sometimes a significant fraction of potential customers are lost in such friction points.
Therefore, there is a need to overcome problems with the prior art, and more specifically, a need for facilitating users during the process of creating media-based projects. A media-based project creation utilizes photos, videos, audio-videos, pictures, and/or text. As used herein, the phrase “photobook” shall be synonymous with any type of media-based product. The inventors have developed several unique solutions to the aforementioned problems associated with creation of media-based projects.